LEONARD SORVOJA(1867-1936)

There was later, after you had died,

and decade after decade after you became the soil

you had worked with mindless dedication

on those days when the body remained in the fields

and the man was away,

a damnatio memoriae on your name

and then, from your grandchildren's lips,

two single tales carrying a condemnation,

stains of different sorts on your name.

That above, the man lost

in who knows what distant vision,

and what I will leave off and tell only on my kin,

from dawn to almost dusk on the river-side.

Then the fights you had with your son

as long as you lived, about the real sin,

the civil war and the side to which you cast your lot

when they so nearly killed your son.

It always ended in a fight about the civil war

when the they met, your grand-children said;

until on this day you died:

April 4th 1936

and we put a damnatio memoriae on your name,

the blood in our veins, the marrow

in our bones and the flesh on our bones.

04.04.2018